Chapter 14: It’s Not Personal

The dark. The heat. The pain. I tried to make friends with it all, accepting the agony and anger as fuel.

I moved as fast as I could with my hands out in front of me at an angle, feeling my way forward. My shoulder hit the side of the tunnel when it made a sharp turn. I appreciated being only in my breeches, soaked in sweat from the stifling heat.

A few more mitres ahead, I could make out another red-orange glow. I quickened my pace since the dim light penetrated the darkness, and soon I emerged into another large open area with thick columns of rock, natural and irregular shapes. While the light was low, I could make out the barriers and did my best to continue onward.

I was far behind the other two, but I had to push that concern out of my mind. The random shapes and placement of rock columns confused me, and soon I lost my direction like a child in an unknown forest.

My father had taught me how to move when lost in a forest, but the success of that depended upon sunlight or stars or moon, a fixed point in the sky that I could use to navigate or use as an origin of some kind.

First, my father had instructed me to make sure I was calm, refusing to make any decisions out of desperation or panic. Fear corrupted any choice, and so I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath.

Then a fist struck me in the side of the head.

I reeled, and the world spun around me. Disoriented, I stumbled and covered by head with my arms. Another punch landed on my ribs and midsection. My shoulder struck stone, a column, and I slid down and rolled aside.

There was a sound of flesh hitting rock, and a voice cried out. My vision cleared, and when I stepped back, there was the boy, holding his hand and squinting in pain.

“Mande!” I said. “Why?”

That was a dumb question. So dumb Mande didn’t answer, not that I ever heard him say a word.

This wasn’t a game or a competition of skill. Someone was going to die, and Mande had decided I would be the one that didn’t survive.

Mande bared his teeth and came at me again.

I sidestepped his attack, my feet sliding over while I leaned away from his punch. I lifted my right foot and sent it into his crotch. Hard.

Not very nice, I know. But I didn’t want to waste any more time. I had to try and catch Felix.

My heel had driven into his groin, a precise Sand-bol type kick.

Mande’s frown shifted into a grimace, his open mouth soundless but it looked like a scream. He fell to the rock floor in a ball.

I peered upwards and found a fixed point – a stalactite situated back toward the tunnel I just exited – and I now moved away from that point in a general direction around and past columns of rocks until sounds reached my ears, swelling noises that rumbled and roared.

Circling the final column of stone, there was a flat area and another gaping pit. However, this time a narrow stone bridge stretched before me across the chasm. The walkway appeared at least 75 mitres from this side of the pit to the other.

The ground shook beneath me, and my brow furrowed. I stepped a few paces closer to the edge of the chasm and paused in horror while the lava erupted from beneath, surging upward to the top of the pit.

The horror wasn’t for the lava alone, though. There were shapes within the lava, squirming things. I squinted. The shapes were like snakes but thicker, each of them a sickly yellow with a gaping maw at one end and rows of teeth. They were worms. In the lava.

The lava worms were each as long as the span of my arm, and they bounded up out of the lava like they had been swimming and landed on the stone bridge, hundreds of them at a time, covering it, their mouths snapping and chewing at air.

After a few moments, the churning lava receded. A good portion of the lava worms remained and wiggled about, but after another set of seconds they launched themselves off the walkway and back into the lava below.

That was the way forward.

I found no sign of Felix. The other side of the walkway was filled with shadow. If he was there, he was beyond my sight. Perhaps he fell down into the pit.

I swallowed hard. Then I cursed myself.

I should have been counting ... something. Heartbeats, seconds, using a measure to determine how much time I would have to get across.

The ground rumbled. The lava erupted. Once the liquid fire reached the top of the pit, I began counting, and eight heartbeats later, the lava abated. I counted the next set. Another eight heartbeats until the ground rumbled and the lava rose.

Could I make it over 75 mitres in that amount of time? I would have to.

I was on heartbeat four and watching the segmented lava worms rolling over the stone bridge when a scuffling sound came from behind me, barely audible amidst the grumbling lava and squeaks from the worms.